Neal Cassady

`this is where it was," Gary Riley says, sitting in the passenger seat of the rental car and pointing to an empty lot several blocks north of the faceless glass thicket of another American downtown. "The Queen City Apartments. I was in college, driving home one night, when I heard there was a fire at 26th and Champa. I thought to myself, `That's where Neal Cassady lived.' So I drove over here and picked up a few of the bricks." They now support bookshelves _ containing a comprehensive Beat library _ in Riley's house on Sherman Street.

JACK KEROUAC: King of the Beats. Barry Miles. Henry Holt. $25. 322 pp. D.H. Lawrence warned readers to be wary of what novelists say about themselves. "Never trust the teller, trust the tale," Lawrence said. Sometimes it's even risky to trust the tale, especially when the writer is Jack Kerouac, whose books based on his own life have promoted an image of him -- as the carefree, silver-tongued hipster -- that is more hype than fact. This biography by Barry Miles is devoted to puncturing the myth.

JACK KEROUAC: King of the Beats. Barry Miles. Henry Holt. $25. 322 pp. D.H. Lawrence warned readers to be wary of what novelists say about themselves. "Never trust the teller, trust the tale," Lawrence said. Sometimes it's even risky to trust the tale, especially when the writer is Jack Kerouac, whose books based on his own life have promoted an image of him -- as the carefree, silver-tongued hipster -- that is more hype than fact. This biography by Barry Miles is devoted to puncturing the myth.

Whenever the sun goes down on some old broken-down river pier in America, someone is savoring Jack Kerouac's On the Road for the first time and dreaming of rucksack rebellion. And someone is studying William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, or perhaps just stealing it. The Beat Generation writers were born disillusioned, but their message of freedom and the jazzy vernacular of the street have endured and touched new generations of readers who are reviving the popularity of writers like Kerouac, Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg.

Whenever the sun goes down on some old broken-down river pier in America, someone is savoring Jack Kerouac's On the Road for the first time and dreaming of rucksack rebellion. And someone is studying William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, or perhaps just stealing it. The Beat Generation writers were born disillusioned, but their message of freedom and the jazzy vernacular of the street have endured and touched new generations of readers who are reviving the popularity of writers like Kerouac, Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg.

Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties. Robert Stone. $25.95. 229 pp. Near the end of Prime Green, surely the most disappointing book to come out in this young and troubled year, Robert Stone presents an off-hand observation about the merits and uses of nonfiction writing that serves as an unintentional indictment of the very book he himself has delivered into our hands: "The best nonfiction writers -- John McPhee, for example -- create multidimensional characters,...

I wrote to you before during that whole French wine thing, but now I'm writing about a subject I'd much rather talk about, that of Jack Kerouac, a Frenchman yes, but my favorite writer ever. It is always great to see anything nowadays about Kerouac, though every now and then he seems to make a comeback. He was and still is a misunderstood man. If you ask people who Kerouac was, those who even know the name generally say he was the head Beatnik, or something like that. Actually, Kerouac couldn't stand the Beatniks, hated their phony type of cool posturing.

WITHOUT A HERO AND OTHER STORIES. By T. Coraghessan Boyle. Viking. $21.95. 238 pp. Many of T. Coraghessan Boyle's stories are wonderfully droll, the result of a quicksilver flow of prose in the service of wicked satire. A far smaller number of them issues from a more somber sensibility, one surprisingly willing to make allowances for foibles rather than make fun of them. Taken together, these two tendencies - to go for the jugular or to attend to the wounds - make up the complete Boyle and make him one of the nation's most engaging literary tricksters.

Herbert Huncke, the charismatic street hustler, petty thief and perennial drug addict who enthralled and inspired a galaxy of acclaimed writers and gave the Beat Generation its name, died on Thursday at Beth Israel Hospital in New York City. He was 80. The cause was congestive heart failure, said Jerry Poynton, his friend and literary executor. Mr. Huncke had lived long enough to become a hero to a new generation of adoring artists and writers, not to mention a reproach to a right-thinking, clean-living establishment that had long predicted his imminent demise.

The Source, a stirring, kaleidescopic documentary about the Beat generation and its legacy, ranges from the exultant 1940s photo of the young friends Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs to the Jeopardy show on which contestants could win money by asking, "Who were the Beats?" ("Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Lawrence Ferlinghetti were part of this group of writers.") The wizardry of Chuck Workman is well known to viewers of the Academy Awards broadcast, which has been brightened by his witty, rapid-fire compilations of film clips.

`this is where it was," Gary Riley says, sitting in the passenger seat of the rental car and pointing to an empty lot several blocks north of the faceless glass thicket of another American downtown. "The Queen City Apartments. I was in college, driving home one night, when I heard there was a fire at 26th and Champa. I thought to myself, `That's where Neal Cassady lived.' So I drove over here and picked up a few of the bricks." They now support bookshelves _ containing a comprehensive Beat library _ in Riley's house on Sherman Street.

The upcoming match between the ass-kicking barbarians of the Pittsburgh Steelers and the quiescent young men of the Arizona Cardinals might be anything but super. Most of the sports books have the Cardinals as seven-point underdogs, but few people give much credence to that line. Taking the Cards and the line is sure-fire doom, the sort of bet that only an adrenaline junkie with a need to scream through the entire Super Bowl would take. And yet, I've bet the Cards, which makes me either hellaciously stupid or one of those natural-born speed freaks.

I just got back from one of America's great travel cities. A travel city -- I came up with the designation on the flight out -- is a city that, through either setting or contents (ideally, a combination of the two), evokes a spirit of travel. And by this I don't mean a city that inspires people to visit it; that is a travel destination, and we have plenty of those. I mean a city that possesses numerous elements that speak, for tourists and residents alike, to a universal idea of travel.